The following article - about Japanese cities to be built in Australia,
called "Pacifica" and "The Multi-Function Polis" -
was written in 1992. Since then, the New World Order has asserted itself
over rival world-orders such as the Japanese were offering.

It would seem that the U.S. had to tolerate the "Japan model"
during the Cold War, to secure Japan's support against the USSR, and as
a model to inspire post-Mao China, drawing it away from the Soviet model.
But since the Cold War, Wall Street has attacked the "Japan model"
with all guns blazing.

Firstly, to rein in the Japanese banks, the Bank of International Settlements
raised the capital adequacy ratio to 8% (see Patrick S. J. Cormack, The
Money Masters, pp. 73-4: money-masters.html).

Secondly, the "Asia Crisis" was created, by moving massive
funds in over a period of years, then withdrawing them suddenly. Leading
Japan-analyst Chalmers Johnson, who first exposed the means by which Japan
had created its wealth in his book Miti and the Japanese Miracle,
has more recently analysed how the West created the "financial crisis"
to bring Japan down: asia-crisis.html. And
with it, Indonesia and other Asian governments. The Timor intervention
is probably less about the rights of the Timorese, than about the need
of the New World Order to pick off rival "strong states" one-by-one.

The fate of the proposed "Multi Function Polis" appeared to
have been sealed during the first week of December 1991, when a high-ranking
Japanese 'investment mission' visited the primary site at Port Adelaide
as well as other sites around Australia. The headline of an article in
The Australian said it all: "Japan mission pulls plug on MFP investment"
(6/12/91). John Bannon's protests in the media the following day appeared
unconvincing.

Readers might therefore have been surprised at a headline in the same
newspaper six weeks later (a similar one was used in the billboards): "Japan
plans 300,000-people regional centre in our desert", in which the
news was first broken of a plan to build a city called Pacifica (Pacific
City), about 200 km south of Broome (24/1/92, with a follow-up the following
day). The name would seem to be misplaced, in that the site is actually
on the Indian Ocean (100 km inland). Pacific City would be in the Great
Sandy Desert, in the Marble Bar region, the hottest area of the continent;
water would be piped from the Fitzroy River. The Macquarie Atlas records
that in the summer of 1923-24, the average maximum temperature at Marble
Bar exceeded 38 degrees for a span of 160 days. One wonders whether such
a city would have to be built underground. The new city would be the second
biggest in Western Australia (after Perth), and the biggest in the 'top
end' (north of Brisbane). This article examines the light that this new
proposal throws on the (not-to-be-confused) Multi-Function Polis; it would
appear that some lessons have been learned from the fate of the earlier
proposal.

The newspaper states that "a spokesman for Adelaide's multi-function
polis" said the proposed Pacific City would be substantially different
from MFP Australia, which was essentially an Australian project with international
interest. More by default than design, one might add: John Bannon could
not find the international investors he had sought and promised. Australian
projects do not typically have an International Advisory Board jointly
co-chaired by the Australian government and the Japanese government. However,
MFP Adelaide IS an Australian project in that, having rejected the leisure
focus in the original Japanese proposal (which was aimed at the Gold Coast
and Cairns) in favour of the high-tech 'carrot', the Australian side seemed
to misunderstand the Japanese needs, interests and intentions, as Humphrey
McQueen correctly points out; for this reason, their money is not forthcoming,
finding the Integrated Tourism Resort zones more attractive.

Whereas the MFP was apparently conjured up by bureaucrats in Japan's
Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), the plan for Pacific
City is being developed by a private company, Shimizu Corporation, a construction
giant in the mould of Kumagai Gumi, "in consultation with Japanese
academics". The Nikkei Weekly newspaper, of the week ending 25/1/92,
reports that Kumagai, Shimizu, and other construction contractors, are
scaling down their activities in Europe, on account of the oversupply of
office space and the scarcity of tenants; it also reports that Kumagai
and two other Japanese contractors are pulling out of several construction
projects in the U.S., on account of the recession there. The paper quotes
Kumagai's Masatoshi Shibata as saying, "We will abandon other development
plans in Europe and concentrate our efforts in lower-risk subcontracting
for civil engineering and other construction projects"; and Tsutomu
Shimizu, president of Shimizu Corp. Properties (U.K.) Ltd, as saying, "In
the future, we will concentrate on subcontracting and public works".
In the light of such comments, and the state of the world economy, Pacific
City would appear to be an unusually adventureous proposal.

Shimizu envisages Pacific City as the Brussels of a future Pacific economic
community; however

¥ such a community has not yet been formed, and its shape is unclear

¥ the site of its headquarters would be chosen by all member countries

¥ they would probably prefer a site near the economic or political
centre of the region

¥ many more hospitable sites would be available to choose from,
including "tropical paradises". Their advantages would include
cheaper construction costs.

As a result of the "Brussels" connection, the relevant liasing
Australian department is likely to be Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT),
rather than Industry Technology and Commerce (DITAC) as in the case of
the MFP. The DFAT attack on DITAC reported in the Financial Review of 25/10/91
suggests that DFAT is more inclined to do Tokyo's bidding.

The Australian article of 24/1/92 states that there have been no talks
between the Japanese and Australian governments about Pacific City, although
Mr Corcoran of the Australian embassy in Japan contributed to the blueprint.
By comparison, the MFP proposal was consistently presented as a government-to-government
project, even though the funding would have to come from private (Japanese)
corporations. This was one of its weaknesses in that, despite the power
of MITI, those corporations have a mind of their own when it comes to spending
their money. Right to the very end, the private corporations supposedly
behind the MFP remained shrouded in mist. Were they being dragged begrudgingly
by MITI, to fulfil a make-work idea hatched up by dreamy 'apple polishers'
in its Leisure Division, as Humphrey McQueen suggested (ABC Radio's First
Edition, 28/5/91)? Or did MITI borrow the idea from the Mitsubishi Electric
Corporation's concept of a 'technobelt', as described by Peter Rimmer (Australian
Planner, June 1989; also see Rimmer's chapter in Bonsai Australia Banzai,
ed. Gavan McCormack, Pluto Press 1991; this book is the major work on the
MFP). What was in it for the Japanese side?

Another likely difference between the two proposals, is that the silly
phrases and concepts of the former proposal, apparently dreamt up by junior
bureaucrats as a form of verbal doodling, will no doubt have gone away,
replaced by hard-headed engineering plans. The problems of the MFP began
with the name Multi-Function Polis itself. A polis is a city, and every
city has multiple functions; so what's new? It was supposed to be a 'City
of the Fifth Sphere', using a schema of human history which as Gavan McCormack,
professor of East Asian history at ANU, put it, was "charming in its
naive idiocy". Associated with the fanciful phrases, was the emphasis
on pictures and artists' sketches, in the portraits of the so-called City
of the Twenty First Century. The fact that not one environmentalist was
involved in the planning of MFP Adelaide somehow did not fit right with
such a notion. Whilst big on pictures, the detailed parameters of the proposal,
such as why it had been downsized from 200,000 to 100,000, were hard to
find. One sentence in the recent 13-volume report stated "MFP-Adelaide
will be the first of many projects to be undertaken throughout Australia
as a result of the MFP process".

The switch from the Centralised version of the MFP, in which it was
all-in-one-place, a single city, to the Distributed Version, in which it
was broken into smaller pieces spread around the country, has never been
explicitly publicly admitted, let alone explained, by Senator Button; yet
he privately admitted it to me on the 4th of June last year, and has implied
it in public statements since. A careful comparison between the 1989 Anderson-Kinhill
Report (Section 1, pages 14-20) and the 1991 Kinhill-Delfin Report, suggests
that major structural changes have been made in the multi-billion-dollar
proposal, without any statement as such, highlighting or explanation. A
major reason would seem to be that the Adelaide site lacks the resort appeal
of the Gold Coast; further, it is a toxic waste dump and a swamp, on the
coast and largely below sea level (and the sea level is likely to rise).
Yet if these problems deterred investors from MFP-Adelaide, why would the
hot sandy desert near Marble Bar be appealing to Shimizu? To green the
desert, and make such a city habitable and environmentally friendly, would
require such advanced engineering that one might ask whether the project
would be a prelude to settlements on the moon or Mars.

The government-to-government tone of the MFP led to the situation where
the Australian government would be a player-umpire, a mix of roles that
did not work well. Despite the government-to-government dealing over the
MFP, early impressions were that the actual funding of the proposal would
be done privately, without government input or subsidy. Yet Japanese construction
companies are used to government funding of infrastructure costs, and over
time it emerged that they would expect the Australian and South Australian
governments to first spend billions of dollars on the Port Adelaide site,
in cleanup and infrastructure costs, before they would contribute. The
project thus became a major financial risk for Australian taxpayers, and
for the pension funds John Bannon increasingly was looking to. Not all
'technopolises' in Japan have prospered; and a number of grand projects
in Australia have failed, such as the Monarto scheme, and rice-growing
at Humpty-Doo in the Northern Territory. Admittedly, the Ord River Scheme
is now deemed a success.

At the suggestion of Professor David Yencken, Senation Button instigated
a Community Consultation Process for the MFP proposal. The government-funded
Community Consultation Panel presented only the YES case, while the NO
case received no public funding for research or presentation. The chairman,
Mr Lansdown, supposedly a neutral umpire, did not hide his support for
the project, and refused to allow a contrary motion to be put from the
floor of a major meeting in Adelaide. It seems that when the government
is a player, it is a poor umpire.

The Australian (25/1/92) quotes Mr Ashley Crawford, editor of 21C, the
magazine of the Commission for the Future, pointing out the advantages
of building Pacific City as an entirely new city. Yet earlier versions
of the MFP envisaged it, too, as a 'greenfields' site (though not in the
desert). The advantages listed by Mr Crawford seem to be recycled ideas
from the various prolific MFP think-tanks, which provided rich pickings
for our more talented thinkers.

A major difference apparent at this stage, is that whereas the MFP was
touted as a favour that Japan was doing for Australia and the world, Pacific
City is presented more realistically as primarily for the satisfaction
of Japanese needs: "Japan is a country overcrowded with people and
we have to think about how we create new space", Mr Shinichiro Fujisawa,
of Shimizu Australia, is quoted as saying (The Australian, 24/1/92). In
the MFP proposals, the inability of the Australian thinkers to distinguish
the needs and interests of the two sides (Japanese and Australian) was
a fatal flaw. For example, intellectual property rights over inventions
were never identified as an important issue, a major parameter of the project
which should be resolved at the start of the marriage rather than down
the track. This, even from people who should have known better, such as
Barry Jones, who wrote in his book Sleepers Wake (1982 edition), "Multi-national
corporations dominate the commanding heights of the Australian economy"
(p. 221) and "Parliaments should legislate to provide that control
of national assets - especially minerals and energy - remain in Australian
hands" (p. 245).

Technological know-how is an asset as important as the raw materials
themselves. An example of the relevance of Jones' statement is seen in
Australia's lack of any intellectual property rights in the coal-to-oil
conversion technology which the Japanese government and companies developed
in Victoria in the 1980s, and which will be put into usage when oil becomes
more expensive; this project is described by Shinobu Ohe in Gavan McCormack
(ed) Bonsai Australia Banzai, subtitled Multifunction Polis and the Making
of a Special Relationship with Japan (Pluto Press 1991). McCormack, perhaps
the senior Australian expert on Japan, writes "Japan has been encouraged
to see Australia as a long-term energy supply source on terms which include
complete Japanese monopoly of technical data" (Introduction). Arrangements
over such matters feature prominently in joint ventures between R &
D organisations overseas: their omission in this case undermines the credibility
of all those who promoted the MFP project.

The MFP has been a particularly difficult issue for the Left in Australia
to handle. There is a need to embrace Asia, culturally, in population mix,
and economically, but not politically; a need to join the group, while
yet preserving independence. The majority Anglo-Saxon/Celtic culture in
Australia will have to gradually share status and power with Australians
belonging to other subcultures. The difficulty will be, doing this while
at the same time safeguarding our political freedoms, such as they are,
and pursuing economic independence, in the sense of being as free as possible
of economic control by other, more powerful, countries. The MFP, and other
proposals such as Pacific City, might be seen as instruments of such 'Asianisation',
yet it is inescapable that all such proposals in recent years, beginning
with the Silver Columbia Plan, then moving to the MFP, then the Integrated
Tourism Resort zones where foreigners can freely buy and sell Australian
real estate, and now Pacific City, have come from just one country - Japan.
Is it Asianisation or Japanisation?

It was much easier for the Left to deal with British and U.S. domination
of Australia, in earlier decades, than it has been to deal with Japanese
economic domination more recently. The risk in dealing with the latter,
is that the white supremicist cause will be assisted. Some in the Left
appear far from impartial in their posture on such matters; an example
is Humphrey McQueen, who recently returned to Australia after a period
as Professor of Australian Studies at Tokyo University, to which he had
been nominated by the Department of Employment, Education and Training.
In his recent book Japan to the Rescue, he aims to demythologise our relationship
with the U.S.; even Malcolm Fraser is now doing the same (Sunday Age, 26/1/92).
But McQueen, unlike those who argue that we should be free of such "special
relationships", seems to believe that we need Japan as a protector
against potentially hostile forces, principally Indonesia. Condemning the
operation of the U.S. bases in Australia as "a continuing cessation
of sovereignty" (p.137), a sentiment the present author agrees with,
he welcomes the prospect of Mitsubishi testing its new FSX fighter, the
first it has made since the Zero, at Woomera (p.343). One wonders whether
he would have supported the planned MX missile tests, which Bob Hawke was
forced to forego through pressure from the Left; and one wonders whether
he supported the British tests at Maralinga.

On ABC radio (First Edition, 28/5/91) McQueen stated, "The Japanese
side wanted the MFP to be at Surfers Paradise, not in Adelaide, where no-one
wanted it. ... The MFP as a leisure city is already in place at Surfers
Paradise, funded entirely by non-government investment", with Bond
University, now 100% foreign-owned, as a key focus. Yet writing in the
ABC's 24 Hours (Jan. 92), he shows that he too has misunderstood the Japanese
intentions. In an essay sponsored by the Ideas for Australia program, he
addresses the question, How to make Canberra earn its keep? Trotting out
the usual line that all opponents to the MFP are racist or xenophobic,
McQueen concludes that the best place in Australia for an MFP is Canberra;
it fact, everything is already in place there, except that the various
components need to be connected together to provide an information city.
By this point he seems to have forgotten his earlier complaint about Canberra
being privileged in comparison to the rest of the country, and out of touch
with it, to which the first half of his essay was devoted. His peak statement,
"If there is to be an MFP, Australians will have to design and build
it ourselves. Canberra is the obvious site", implies a belief that,
all along, the Japanese side saw the MFP as merely a favour, a gift. This
approach ignores not only the 'resort city' interpretation of the MFP which
McQueen had earlier espoused, in which he said that it already exists at
Surfers Paradise, but also the MITI document of September 1987, which might
be seen as building around the MFP complex "a comprehensive development
plan for Australia" (McCormack, Bonsai Australia Banzai, p.40), involving
the management of Cape York spaceport and the energy and minerals industries,
and which sees these in terms of Japanese needs or, more precisely, providing
what Japan lacks. In this sense, the document may be seen as identifying
opportunities for Australia, but it implies that the management of such
projects, and the profits, might largely be in Japanese hands. On the other
hand, one might argue that since the eclipse of John McEwen and Rex Connor,
the Australian people have had a minimal role in the management of Australian
resources, and minimal profits.

We must look for the self-interest in any Japanese proposal; nothing
must be taken at face value. In any exchange of goods of services, between
two people, two companies, or two governments, each side can be presumed
(as a rule of thumb) to be pursuing its own self-interest. In discerning
Japan's needs or interests, we then ask whether, and how, they can mesh
with our needs or interests. If so, a deal is done. The most sure-footed
approach Australia as a country can take to Japan, is to see it as a country
that needs us as much as we need it, perhaps moreso, and to do hard bargaining
over the provision of each other's needs. That way, there is more chance
of an outcome advantageous to both sides, and a relationship which is satisfying
and stable in the long term. In any event, Japan is sure to have a strong
presence in Australia.

The notion of Internationalism has had particular appeal to the Left,
probably in part via the Marxist admonition to the workers of the world
that they unite with one another (across national boundaries) rather than
with their bosses (inspired by nationalist sentiments). The Internationalisation
pursued by Paul Keating sounded similar, and thereby confused the Left.
As a result, an economy which might have been one of the most self-sufficient
in the world, gave up any pretence of control over its own destiny. Sorting
out what Internationalism does and does not mean, will be a major task
for the Left in the next few years.

Should the planners of Pacific City follow in the MFP's footsteps by
attempting to control public consciousness (McCormack, Bonsai Auatralia
Banzai, p. 48), the project will be likely to fail. Open discussion of
all aspects of the proposal is required, with early examination of existing
and anticipated environmental problems and clear statements on the main
parameters such as the Japanese interest, the economic base of the project,
Australian outlays and subsidies, whether the foreign investors would bring
in debt or equity, the ownership of technology, the political processes
to operate in the city, its place in the state and federal structure, and
the conditions on which the project would proceed. A recognised ecologist,
an expert in environmental design, should be involved in the planning of
any such new proposals, at the senior level and right from the start. Who
better than our own visionary, Bill Mollison. {end}

In 2005, I heard that an underground sea has since been discovered beneath
The Great Sandy Desert, with the suggestion that the Japanese proponents
knew about it at the time and would have used it as the water supply.